California High Speed Rail Bloghttp://www.cahsrblog.com
California High Speed Rail support blog, spreading news and info about the high speed trains project approved by California voters in November 2008.Thu, 30 Jul 2015 16:17:07 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.6Texas HSR Gets a New Leader and New Moneyhttp://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/texas-hsr-gets-a-new-leader-and-new-money/
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/texas-hsr-gets-a-new-leader-and-new-money/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 16:17:07 +0000http://www.cahsrblog.com/?p=7154Some good news for the Texas Central high speed rail project this week:

The board of directors of Texas Central Partners appointed Tim Keith of Dallas as the new CEO and announced the closing of a round of development funding that brings $75 million dollars in new capital, all from Texas-based investors, into the company. The offering was oversubscribed and the funds will be used to support ongoing development activities.

The new funding comes just two months after the proposed Dallas-to-Houston bullet train system was almost derailed by opposition in the state legislature.

So they won an important legislative fight, have a new chief executive, and got some more capital. All great news. Sure, California HSR has over $4 billion in capital in the door from state and local government, but that’s cool Texas, you need money too.

Their estimate is that they need $12 billion to build the project. But they’ll also need administrative help from the state to get environmental clearances done, and maybe land acquisition, which gives opponents some leverage to try and stop it from happening.

]]>http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/texas-hsr-gets-a-new-leader-and-new-money/feed/161Palmdale Welcomes HSR and its Economic Benefitshttp://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/palmdale-welcomes-hsr-and-its-economic-benefits/
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/palmdale-welcomes-hsr-and-its-economic-benefits/#commentsTue, 28 Jul 2015 22:43:21 +0000http://www.cahsrblog.com/?p=7151Today NPR’s Marketplace examined the effect of high speed rail on Palmdale and the likely boost to the local economy that it will bring – particularly by shortening commutes.

A commuter train takes about two hours to get to Los Angeles. The bullet train could cut that time to 20 minutes.

Sammy Hults lives in Palmdale and travels for work. “It would allow me to look for work in more different major cities,” he says. “And having this rail, it’d be really easy to get there because travel time is really short.”Shorter travel times could also have a big impact on real estate. Palmdale has traditionally been an outpost for people who can’t afford to buy property in Los Angeles.

“It’s really affordable still, and that’s one of the reasons that a lot of people move into the area,” says Marco Henriquez, who owns Amigo Real Estate. “You can have a house and pay a lot less. Most of the times, half what you pay in the L.A. area.”

No doubt that real estate agents are salivating over the prospect of it being faster to get to downtown LA from Palmdale than from Santa Monica. The median sales price for a home in Palmdale is $230,000 according to Trulia which is shockingly cheap. The average for Los Angeles County is $475,000 and far higher than that along the coasts. Of course, HSR will also bring jobs to the Antelope Valley, as reverse commutes become possible.

HSR will also give a boost to existing businesses. When you cut the distance and time of a commute, residents have more money and more opportunity to support local businesses:

Other business could also benefit from shortened commute times.

Roxana Martinez owns Lucky Roxy’s Café. She often doesn’t see her regulars during the work-week because so much of their free time is eaten by the commute.

“By the time they get home, it’s practically like 7:30, 8 o’clock,” she says. “The kids are going to sleep, so they’re not really going to go out and dine. So I think that, just having that station here, and reducing the commute, I see it as a benefit to us. I see more customers coming in.”

Roxy’s customers rave about the café’s country gravy. And while it’s too much to call high-speed rail her ‘gravy train,’ it will help her sell more gravy.

To those benefits we can also add savings on gas. Palmdale residents are paying around $4 a gallon for gas, which adds up fast on a daily commute to and from the LA basin. Saving money on gas means more money to spend on local gravy.

As this article shows, HSR better for businesses and for quality of life. And the more people who use HSR to commute to Los Angeles, the less people will be driving on the 14 freeway, helping improve the Antelope Valley’s air quality as well.

Glad to see NPR highlighting these benefits.

]]>http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/palmdale-welcomes-hsr-and-its-economic-benefits/feed/220Hanford To Begin Studying an HSR Stationhttp://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/hanford-to-begin-studying-an-hsr-station/
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/hanford-to-begin-studying-an-hsr-station/#commentsThu, 23 Jul 2015 22:50:56 +0000http://www.cahsrblog.com/?p=7149Some welcome news out of Kings County, where Hanford is considering a station planning grant:

The council previously considered accepting the $600,000 grant from the California High Speed Rail Authority on June 2. The authority plans to fund the grant using $200,000 of Proposition 1A money and $400,000 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

As a condition of the grant, the city would have to provide a local match of $200,000, plus $50,000 for staff time and other services. Representatives from Kings and Tulare counties, as well as the city of Visalia, have offered to contribute to the matching funds.

Visalia in particular has always been a strong supporter of HSR, in part because their leaders understand quite well how important the project is to their city’s economic future:

Visalia City Manager Mike Olmos said the Hanford high-speed rail station should serve as a regional station to benefit the surrounding area. Olmos said one of Visalia’s weaknesses in attracting businesses is its lack of connectivity to the rest of the state.

“Our council has been very clear that if the project does happen that we would come and try to partner with Hanford and the Kings County community to try to bring a regional station to fruition,” Olmos said. “It benefits all of us in several ways, primarily economic development.”

It’s really good to see Visalia leaders express this strong support for HSR and this keen understanding of why the status quo isn’t working for the Valley. As the economy booms on the coast, the Central Valley is getting left behind because it isn’t well connected to those coastal metropolises. HSR can bring jobs and businesses to Hanford and Visalia, something both communities desperately need.

HSR becomes even more important in the midst of a drought, as the agricultural industry struggles to manage the lack of water. There will always be farming in the Valley, but the drought is a reminder that the region must diversify and add in new businesses and industries if it is to survive.

]]>http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/hanford-to-begin-studying-an-hsr-station/feed/133Tuesday Open Threadhttp://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/tuesday-open-thread-5/
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/tuesday-open-thread-5/#commentsTue, 21 Jul 2015 17:17:56 +0000http://www.cahsrblog.com/?p=7147Been offline for most of the last week at Netroots Nation in Phoenix. Got a chance to use the city’s light rail system, which is useful even in the hot sprawl of central Arizona.

• This week’s True Detective episode directly references the California High Speed Rail Authority, including using their logo and name in a scene that implies an Authority official is involved in shady land deals and morally dubious extracurricular activities – and willing to collude with a gangster to keep it quiet. The show went to pains to not use the name of the City of Vernon, even though that’s where most of the story takes place. So why not mask the CHSRA name? If I were the Authority, I’d be pissed, though I probably wouldn’t want to draw more attention to a show that nobody seems to be watching.

Eye-popping gasoline prices in Los Angeles are driving Dean Smith into a second job.

The 54-year-old L.A. city clerk shook his fist Monday at a 76 gasoline station pump where gas reached $4.65 a gallon. He said he now works on the side as an Uber driver to help pay his bills.

“I’m mad as hell,” Smith said at the station on 6th Street in downtown L.A. “What can you do? It’s crazy, man. It is crazy.”

Gasoline prices have reached as high as $5 a gallon in the region, and experts predict the daily double-digit increases that began last week could continue a few more days before retreating.

Prices have risen 50 cents a gallon from a week ago in the Los Angeles-Long Beach region amid a shortage of refined petroleum, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California.

The Tesoro Corp. plant in Carson, for instance, just reduced its refining capacity to perform maintenance. That followed Tesoro’s move in February to idle its Northern California refinery in Martinez after a nationwide union walkout. Then Exxon Mobil Corp. scaled back operations at its Torrance facility after an explosion in February damaged an air pollution monitoring unit.

This is like the summer of 2008, when gas prices in California flirted with $5 per gallon. Yet this spike is more surprising given that global oil prices have generally been flat since last year’s price collapse. It would certainly seem like the gas suppliers are manipulating the market and the price, given the number of refineries that are offline.

The only lasting solution is to build more mass transit, from new Metro Rail lines to high speed rail. Gas prices are only going to keep spiking like this, on an overall upward trendline. If California doesn’t accelerate the process of building more rail, these gas prices will only continue to bite harder.

]]>http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/california-gas-prices-soar-again/feed/698Eminent Domain Process Gears Uphttp://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/eminent-domain-process-gears-up/
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/eminent-domain-process-gears-up/#commentsTue, 14 Jul 2015 02:51:27 +0000http://www.cahsrblog.com/?p=7141The California High Speed Rail Authority is accelerating its land acquisition process, and that includes using eminent domain where necessary:

More than a dozen pieces of land in the Valley have been targeted by the state for possible eminent domain for the first stretches of California’s high-speed train project.

The state Public Works Board, meeting Monday in Sacramento, adopted 13 resolutions declaring a public need for properties adding up to more than 72 acres in Fresno, Kings and Tulare counties. The board authorized the use of eminent domain, or condemnation, if necessary to get the land needed for the railroad right of way. The parcels range in size from about 2,200 square feet — about five-hundredths of an acre — to more than 21 acres….

The urgency for the rail authority to get the land it needs for construction is illustrated by the quickened pace at which the state adopted its eminent domain resolutions this year. Nearly 190 of the resolutions encompassing more than 653 acres have been approved since January. Most of the property has been in Kings County, where resistance to the rail authority runs high and loud. There, more than 260 acres of property have been targeted by 52 resolutions, all since March, compared to about 250 acres under 176 resolutions for Fresno County property over the past 20 months.

Overall, the Authority has about a quarter of the parcels it needs between Madera and the southern end of Kings County, and hopefully much more progress will be made in the second half of 2015. Eminent domain is the last resort, but if that’s what it takes to get construction to accelerate, so be it.

We’re just 26 months away from the September 30, 2017 deadline to spend the 2009 stimulus money, of which nearly $4 billion came to California for the high speed rail project. Construction is now in full swing in the Fresno area, but there’s more money to spend, and less and less time in which to spend it. Getting the land acquisition settled helps ensure that the project meets its federal deadlines.

True Detective Season 2 is about many things, but at the heart of it is, in fact, the California High Speed Rail project. The HSR project is the MacGuffin of the story, serving the same role for this show that water did for the 1974 film Chinatown: the thing that kicks off a whole lot of greed, graft, and gruesome murder.

The show itself seems to be a pale shadow of the first season. The dialogue is overwrought and not something you’d likely hear from real people. The plot is intriguing, based not just on HSR but more centrally on a thinly veiled version of the Los Angeles County cities of Vernon and Bell, but it hasn’t really come together yet. The three main detectives are moderately interesting, if caricatures. I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to spend half of the show following Vince Vaughan as a gangster, but those scenes drag.

But you’re not here for critical analysis of a television show. You’re here for high speed rail talk. So is the LA Weekly. Their take on the show’s HSR plot is that it’s “ridiculous”.

First, here’s Vince Vaughn’s character’s explanation of how HSR fits into his scheme:

And here’s the LA Weekly’s take:

There’s actually a lot that’s right here. California voters passed Proposition 1A in 2008, which directed the government to start borrowing money in order to build an 800-mile-long high-speed railroad, or bullet train, connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. No one really knows how much it will cost, but the best guess is in fact $68 billion for Phase 1. So far, so good.

The land Semyon is talking about – “undeveloped valley adjacent to the rail and the coastal highway” – doesn’t sound like anything that actually exists. The current high-speed rail route slices through the middle of California, kind of near the I-5 and far from the coastal highway, the 101. But let’s forgive that, since this is a fictional universe.

The central question is, can you make money from commercial development along the high-speed rail route? According to USC public policy professor Lisa Schweitzer, the answer is a resounding yes.

So what’s the ridiculous part?

So what about the development being “in line for hundreds of millions in federal grants”? And the feds guaranteeing cost overages (murmur, murmur, murmur)?

Total nonsense.

I will admit that when I saw that scene and that line I scoffed, then felt a bit wistful. I would love for the feds to guarantee they’ll pay cost overruns. Can we do that when Democrats take back Congress? Please?

The bigger issue here is whether or not the show’s scheme actually makes that much sense. If you bought up a bunch of property near the HSR route, would you actually make that much money off of it? Enough to set in motion a bunch of gangland murders?

I think the answer is a qualified no. If you’re buying land near, say, Los Banos, you’re wasting your money. The state will use its eminent domain power to take it and will not be interested in paying a dime more than the low appraisal.

What if your plan is to buy land near the stations? There’s actually a realistic chance of profit there, unlike your Los Banos farmland. But it’s not likely to be huge profits, and they won’t arrive anytime soon. Buying a cheap piece of land in downtown Fresno near the station and building transit-oriented development can make you some money…but probably not for ten years. And the profits on that kind of development are not going to be the type that attract the interest of corrupt city managers or casino gangsters.

Back in 2008 there was an attempt by HSR opponents to claim that somehow the project would lead to corruption as people gamed the land buying process. So far that hasn’t materialized at all. The slow pace of land acquisition, the uncertainty around funding, and the basic fact that these parcels aren’t exactly the type to make you a ton of money through speculation, all mitigate against corruption.

Maybe that’s another reason why this season of True Detective has fallen flat – HSR just isn’t seen as something rife with corruption. I mentioned the film Chinatown earlier. Even though that came out over 50 years after LA’s water wars, the public still understood that the era of William Mulholland had the air of corruption, lawbreaking, and general shadiness. Today, viewers in Southern California, at least, might have some knowledge of the scandals in Vernon and Bell – but they don’t see HSR as particularly scandalous, and I doubt anyone outside the state does either.

Finally, there’s this note at the end of the LA Weekly article:

By the by, we reached out to the California High-Speed Rail Authority for comment. Turns out none of them are watching the show.

Smart move. You’re not missing anything.

]]>http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/the-true-detective-plot-twist-i-actually-like/feed/141Friday Open Threadhttp://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/friday-open-thread-9/
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/friday-open-thread-9/#commentsFri, 10 Jul 2015 21:06:27 +0000http://www.cahsrblog.com/?p=7136Been busy of late, and I see the comment section has been as well. No new news to report out of the transportation special session in Sacramento, though I am not expecting a whole lot to get done. Which, given GOP demands, is for the best.
]]>http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/friday-open-thread-9/feed/187Kern Legislators Propose Stealing Cap-and-Trade Money for Roadshttp://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/kern-legislators-propose-stealing-cap-and-trade-money-for-roads/
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/kern-legislators-propose-stealing-cap-and-trade-money-for-roads/#commentsWed, 01 Jul 2015 15:15:00 +0000http://www.cahsrblog.com/?p=7133Well this is some nonsense. Governor Jerry Brown has called a special session to deal with the state’s enormous road maintenance backlog, estimated at $59 billion. The nonsensical part: two Kern County legislators want to raid the cap-and-trade funds to help pay for roads. And it’s a deliberate attack on high speed rail:

Two local lawmakers on Tuesday proposed diverting California High-Speed Rail money to help fill a transportation infrastructure funding gap estimated at $5.7 billion per year — a move that, if approved, would put the $68.5 billion bullet train on ice pending a statewide referendum on whether to end the project.

Co-authored by state Sen. Andy Vidak, R-Hanford, and Assemblyman Rudy Salas, D-Bakersfield, the bill is one of at least two measures proposing to use California cap-and-trade revenue to pay for road, highway and bridge repairs.

Vidak characterized the proposal, one of many attempts to derail what many see as Gov. Jerry Brown’s top legacy project, as a chance for California voters to reverse their 2008 ballot initiative authorizing $9 billion in bonds sales supporting high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“Californians deserve the right to re-vote on this massive transportation project that could end up costing hundreds of billions of dollars if it is ever completed,” he said in a news release referring to skeptical lawmakers’ projections the project’s price tag could eclipse $300 billion. “That money would be better spent on local roads and highways.”

Salas could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

If the bill passes, $500 million set aside for high-speed rail in the 2015-16 state budget would be temporarily frozen, along with $400 million in revenue from cap-and-trade emissions auctions dedicated to the project. It would be released only if voters reaffirm their support for the project during balloting set for June 7, 2016.

Republicans are also proposing to take $1 billion of the cap-and-trade funds each year – that’s about a quarter of the annual total – for road maintenance.

These proposals are terrible and should be declared dead on arrival. Roads need to be maintained, of course. But building carbon-reducing sustainable infrastructure like HSR is also important. Diverting HSR money to roads, or any of the cap-and-trade money to roads, is an affront to the very purpose of the cap-and-trade system.

It might also be illegal. Cap-and-trade funds are supposed to fund projects that help meet the state’s carbon reduction goals. Driving on a road spews carbon into the air. Maintaining roads is important, but it doesn’t help achieve the CO2 reduction targets.

As to a revote on HSR, a few comments. First, this proposal is designed to screw HSR given that they would put the revote on the June 2016 primary ballot, when turnout drops considerably and is skewed toward the right. Second, I’m not opposed to a new HSR vote on a general election ballot – but only if it is tied to brand new funding, rather than a new vote designed to defund the project 8 years after voters approved it, and while workers are already building it.

All of these proposals described above – embargoing HSR funding, sending it to a revote in June 2016 designed to kill the project, and raiding the cap-and-trade funds and giving the money to roads – deserve to die a swift death.

]]>http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/07/kern-legislators-propose-stealing-cap-and-trade-money-for-roads/feed/626CHSRA Solicits Private Sector Input on HSR Construction and Managementhttp://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/06/chsra-solicits-private-sector-input-on-hsr-construction-and-management/
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2015/06/chsra-solicits-private-sector-input-on-hsr-construction-and-management/#commentsThu, 25 Jun 2015 04:02:58 +0000http://www.cahsrblog.com/?p=7130Today’s Bakersfield Californian has a good, in-depth article on the latest effort by the California High Speed Rail Authority to issue a “request for expressions of interest” for international companies and potential private sector partners.

While this is certainly not the first time the CHSRA has solicited responses from the private sector, the Bakersfield Californian article points out that this comes at an important moment in the project’s development. The nature of private sector involvement could determine how much money is needed to get the project built – and how much the private sector plans to contribute.

This process is driven by decisions made way back in the Schwarzenegger Administration (remember him?) that emphasized high speed rail would be built in California not on the model of BART or Metro Rail, where government owns and operates the system and contracts with the private sector to build it – but that HSR would be a public-private partnership, an opportunity for the private sector to do much more and potentially reap greater profits.

I’ve never been a fan of this approach, and one of the very first posts on this blog back in 2008 was about my deep skepticism of using public-private partnerships on the HSR project. But Schwarzenegger wanted it to happen as a condition of his support for the $9 billion in bonds to go to the ballot, and so the deal was cut, though the decisions about what exactly the private sector’s role would be were kicked down the road.

And so here we are, seven years later, with the CHSRA starting to give serious thought to this all important question. The Bakersfield Californian lays out the various options like this:

As the rail authority tries to bring in the private sector, and to a large extent diminish its own central role, many options are on the table. For example, it could hand over much of the rest of the construction, train manufacturing and operation to a single company willing to pay for the privilege. Or, it could set up a series of smaller agreements with different companies…

One option, he said, is to proceed as do major European high-speed rail systems: Have the agency own everything and operate the system itself. Another is to contract with a private company to run the trains but leave ownership to the rail authority.

Or, he said, the authority could build the system and then line up a franchise operator who would get some say in “setting fares, estimating demand, providing capacity, etc.,” like the British do. This gives the government greater control than do other models, but at a cost of retaining commercial risk, which the state may not want.

Another possibility Thompson cited was to give an operating company a full concession to operate the system, including providing the trains. Although this would garner private investment, he said it’s “not a silver bullet since the arrangement can never be any better than the fundamental business performance of the system. He noted that Taiwan tried this and failed.

Otherwise, the system could be fully privatized, as happened in Japan in 1987. The problem with that model, Thompson said, is that payments from the private company might never amount to what taxpayers paid to build the system.

I would strongly prefer the first option, but given the need for private funding to help close the gap and get the system built, I am guessing that some of the other options are more likely.

The key is that whatever the private sector’s role is, it has to be subordinate to the effective operation of the system, including maximizing ridership so that the system can play as large a role as possible in meeting the state’s transportation and carbon reduction needs. A private operator, for example, would be strongly tempted to maximize revenue from fares even if this has the effect of reducing ridership or making the trains unaffordable to working-class Californians.